Epictetus the schoolmaster: None of this is to say that I think poetry should make you good. That certainly was the dominant idea in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Poetry was there to expand your sympathies and inculcate virtue. Poetry could bring you and nature closer together. And, in the context of bourgeois culture in the mid- to late-1800s, it probably did (though how much poetry per se had to do with it is another matter). In any case, all that has gone by the boards since then. It is too much to ask of art to improve your moral fiber. Anyway, l’art pour l’art and the notion of the “autotelic” modernist poem have blown poetic functionality all to hell.
Much of my recent thinking about virtue is influenced by the Stoic philosophers. For them, poetry wasn’t necessarily an evil, but it was a colossal waste of time. If you were writing or interpreting poetry, you weren’t reading or practicing philosophy – and, since this may be your last day, that represented at best a lapse of judgement and at worst a blown last chance to imbue your life with meaning and beauty. Epictetus expressed this most bluntly and sardonically: “Just listen to what he says: ‘This person writes with great sophistication, much better than Dio.’ . . . He doesn’t say, ‘The man is civil, he is constant, he is calm.’” Epictetus goes on to challenge his wealthy, hip young students’ literary ambitions, asking, “So in your sorry state – eager for admirers, counting the number of audience members – do you intend to come to others’ assistance?” He counsels that “rather than reckon, as we are used to doing, ‘How many lines I read, or wrote, today,’ we would pass in review how ‘I applied impulse today the way the philosophers recommend, how I desisted from desire, and practiced aversion only on matters that are under my control.’” Seneca was a poet, but one who thought poetry should convey moral exempla (good or bad). “Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions?” he asks. For Seneca, the proof is in the pudding: “You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men [sic] of the most ignoble and base stamp.” Overmuch concern for poetry and other liberal arts “makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials.” In other words, poetry makes you bad. Ouch, Seneca. Marcus Aurelius literally thanks the gods that he “was not more proficient at rhetoric, poetry, and other pursuits in which I might well have become engrossed . . . .” Double ouch. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with writing & reading poetry or playing & watching basketball, as far as I can tell. Or fiddling while Rome, Australia, or northern California burns. But, given the current crisis, which affects every person on earth (unequally), and promises only to worsen, there may be more pressing things to be doing first, from either an ethical or aesthetical point of view. And it may be advisable to stay away from ambition, as well as from any vestige of the mainstream Poetry Community (read Establishment: English departments, fashionable poetry journals, big conferences & festivals). Why not simply put your work forth yourself for whoever does or doesn’t want to read it (perhaps privately)* or self-consciously and honestly admit to be writing with a coterie audience in mind? If things really are falling apart, then what are you building and protecting? In the meantime, poets will courageously continue to fight for inclusion, equality, safety, freedom, ecological healing, motherhood, and apple pie, in both their poems and (more importantly) their twitter feeds. Onward! ------- * For more on this, see my remarks on “privashing” (as opposed to “publishing”).
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |